This paper studies optimal monetary policy in a framework that explicitly accounts for policymakers uncertainty about the channels of transmission of oil prices into the economy. More specifically, I examine the robust response to the real price of oil that US monetary authorities would have...

The present paper aims at analyzing the sources of labor productivity in Europe at regional level. We study the productivity performance in a sample of twenty European regions belonging to four countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain). Exploiting the increasing availability of disaggregated...

The nineteenth century was a time of substantial changes in the patterns of economic growth. This was also a period of significant fluctuations in the structure of and allocation of political rights. Through successive franchise extensions, democracy expanded dramatically, giving birth to the...

Today, per capita income differences around the globe are large – varying by as much as a factor of 35 across countries (Hall and Jones 1999). These differentials mostly reflect the "Great Divergence" (Sam Huntingon) – the fact that Western Europe and former European colonies grew rapidly...

The permanent decline of equipment prices relative to nondurable consumption prices rendered fixed-base quantity indexes obsolete, because of the well-known substitution bias. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) responded by switching to a flexible-base quantity index to measure GDP...

This paper contributes to the literature on both embodied technical progress and firm dynamics, by formulating an endogenous growth model where selection and imitation play a fundamental role in helping capital good producers to learn about the productivity of technologies embodied in new...

We analyze the transitional dynamics of a model with heterogeneous consumption goods. In this model, convergence is driven by two different forces: the typical diminishing returns to capital and the sectoral change inducing the variation in relative prices. We show that this second force a¤ects...

Europeans restricted their fertility long before other parts of the world did so. By raising the marriage age of women, and ensuring that a substantial proportion remained celibate, the "European Marriage Pattern" (EMP) reduced childbirths by up to 40%. We analyze the rise of this first...

This paper asserts that the accumulation of capital causes cross-country differences in GDP per capita by generating disparities in the sectoral structure. For that purpose, we characterize the dynamic equilibrium of an endogenous growth that exhibits sectoral change due to the introduction of...

Human capital accumulation may negatively affect economic growth by increasing tax avoidance and reducing effective tax rates and productive public investment. This paper analyzes how the endogenous feedback between human capital accumulation and tax avoidance affects economic growth and...